extenuation for this incompatibility of Falstaff with Falstaff--for the
violation of character goes far beyond mere inconsistency or the natural
ebb and flow of even the brightest wits and most vigorous intellects--will
commend itself more readily to the moralist than to the humanist; in
other words, to the preacher rather than to the thinker, the sophist
rather than the artist. Here only does Shakespeare show that he feels
the necessity of condescending to such evasion or such apology as is
implied in the explanation of Falstaff's incredible credulity by a
reference to "the guiltiness of his mind" and the admission, so
gratifying to all minds more moral than his own, that "wit may be made a
Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment." It is the best excuse that
can be made; but can we imagine the genuine, the pristine Falstaff
reduced to the proffer of such an excuse in serious good earnest?
In the original version of this comedy there was not a note of poetry
from end to end; as it then appeared, it might be said to hold the same
place on the roll of Shakespeare's plays as is occupied by _Bartholomew
Fair_ on the roll of Ben Jonson's. From this point of view it is curious
to contrast the purely farcical masterpieces of the town-bred schoolboy
and the country lad. There is a certain faint air of the fields, the
river, and the park, even in the rough sketch of Shakespeare's
farce--wholly prosaic as it is, and in no point suggestive of any
unlikelihood in the report which represents it as the composition or
rather as the improvisation of a fortnight. We know at once that he must
have stroked the fallow greyhound that was outrun on "Cotsall"; that he
must--and perhaps once or twice at least too often--have played truant
(some readers, boys past or present, might wish for association's sake it
could actually have been Datchet-wards) from under the shadow of good Sir
Hugh's probably not over formidable though "threatening twigs of birch,"
at all risks of being "preeches" on his return, in fulfilment of the
direful menace held out to that young namesake of his over whose
innocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditably vigilant. On the other hand, no
student of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociously
familiar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful
pupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavoury
recesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived to
reproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to details
from which Hogarth might have shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in
classic learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater or more
willing diligence in school hours than he must have lavished on other
than scholastic studies in the streets. The humour of his huge
photographic group of divers "humours" is undeniably and incomparably
richer, broader, fuller of invention and variety, than any that
Shakespeare's lighter work can show; all the five acts of the latter
comedy can hardly serve as counterpoise, in weight and wealth of comic
effect, to the single scene in which Zeal-of-the-Land defines the moral
and theological boundaries of action and intention which distinguish the
innocent if not laudable desire to eat pig from the venial though not
mortal sin of longing to eat pig in the thick of the profane Fair, which
may rather be termed a foul than a fair. Taken from that point of view
which looks only to force and freedom and range of humorous effect,
Jonson's play is to his friend's as London is to Windsor; but in more
senses than one it is to Shakespeare's as the Thames at London Bridge is
to the Thames at Eton: the atmosphere of Smithfield is not more different
from the atmosphere of the playing-fields; and some, too delicate of nose
or squeamish of stomach, may prefer Cuckoo Weir to Shoreditch. But
undoubtedly the phantoms of Shallow and Mrs. Quickly which put in (so to
speak) a nominal reappearance in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ are
comparatively as poor and thin if set over against the full rich outlines
of Rabbi Busy and Dame Purecraft as these again are at all points alike
inferior to the real Shallow and the genuine Quickly of _King Henry IV_.
It is true that Jonson's humour has sometimes less in common with
Shakespeare's than with the humour of Swift, Smollett, and Carlyle. For
all his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly
once or twice burnt but so much as a stray pinch of fugitive incense on
the altar of Cloacina; the only Venus acknowledged and adored by those
three latter humourists. If not always constant with the constancy of
Milton to the service of Urania, he never turns into a dirtier byway or
back alley than the beaten path trodden occasionally by most of his kind
which leads them on a passing errand of no unnatural devotion to the
shrine of Venus Pandemos.
When, however, we turn from the raw rough sketch to the enriched and
ennobled version of the present play we find it in this its better shape
more properly comparable with another and a nobler work of Jonson's--with
that magnificent comedy, the first avowed and included among his
collection by its author, which according to all tradition first owed its
appearance and success to the critical good sense and generous good
offices of Shakespeare. Neither my duly unqualified love for the greater
poet nor my duly qualified regard for the less can alter my sense that
their mutual relations are in this one case inverted; that _Every Man in
his Humour_ is altogether a better comedy and a work of higher art than
the _Merry Wives of Windsor_. Kitely is to Ford almost what Arnolphe is
to Sganarelle. (As according to the learned Metaphraste "Filio non
potest praeferri nisi filius," even so can no one but Moliere be
preferred or likened to Moliere.) Without actually touching like
Arnolphe on the hidden springs of tragedy, the jealous husband in
Jonson's play is only kept from trenching on the higher and forbidden
grounds of passion by the potent will and the consummate self-command of
the great master who called him up in perfect likeness to the life.
Another or a deeper tone, another or a stronger touch, in the last two
admirable scenes with his cashier and his wife, when his hot smouldering
suspicion at length catches fire and breaks out in agony of anger, would
have removed him altogether beyond the legitimate pale of comedy. As it
is, the self-control of the artist is as thorough as his grasp and
mastery of his subject are triumphant and complete.
It would seem as though on revision of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_
Shakespeare had found himself unwilling or rather perhaps unable to leave
a single work of his hand without one touch or breath on it of beauty or
of poetry. The sole fitting element of harmonious relief or variety in
such a case could of course be found only in an interlude of pure fancy;
any touch of graver or deeper emotion would simply have untuned and
deranged the whole scheme of composition. A lesser poet might have been
powerless to resist the temptation or suggestion of sentiment that he
should give to the little loves of Anne Page and Fenton a touch of
pathetic or emotional interest; but "opulent as Shakespeare was, and of
his opulence prodigal" (to borrow a phrase from Coleridge), he knew
better than to patch with purple or embroider with seed-pearl the hem of
this homespun little piece of comic drugget. The match between cloth of
gold and cloth of frieze could hardly have borne any good issue in this
instance. Instead therefore of following the lead of Terence's or the
hint of Jonson's example, and exalting the accent of his comedy to the
full-mouthed pitch of a Chremes or a Kitely, he strikes out some forty
and odd lines of rather coarse and commonplace doggrel about brokers,
proctors, lousy fox-eyed serjeants, blue and red noses, and so forth, to
make room for the bright light interlude of fairyland child's-play which
might not unfittingly have found place even within the moon-charmed
circle of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. Even in that all heavenly poem
there are hardly to be found lines of more sweet and radiant simplicity
than here.
The refined instinct, artistic judgment, and consummate taste of
Shakespeare were perhaps never so wonderfully shown as in his recast of
another man's work--a man of real if rough genius for comedy--which we
get in the _Taming of the Shrew_. Only the collation of scene with
scene, then of speech with speech, then of line with line, will show how
much may be borrowed from a stranger's material and how much may be added
to it by the same stroke of a single hand. All the force and humour
alike of character and situation belong to Shakespeare's eclipsed and
forlorn precursor; he has added nothing; he has tempered and enriched
everything. That the luckless author of the first sketch is like to
remain a man as nameless as the deed of the witches in _Macbeth_, unless
some chance or caprice of accident should suddenly flash favouring light
on his now impersonal and indiscoverable individuality, seems clear
enough when we take into account the double and final disproof of his
imaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce has put forward with such
unanswerable certitude. He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist
from that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look so grossly out
of place in the homely setting of his usual style that they seem
transmuted from real to sham. On the other hand, he is of all the Pre-
Shakespeareans known to us incomparably the truest, the richest, the most
powerful and original humourist; one indeed without a second on that
ground, for "the rest are nowhere." Now Marlowe, it need scarcely be
once again reiterated, was as certainly one of the least and worst among
jesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets. There can
therefore be no serious question of his partnership in a play wherein the
comic achievement is excellent and the poetic attempts are execrable
throughout.
The recast of it in which a greater than Berni has deigned to play the
part of that poet towards a lesser than Bojardo shows tact and delicacy
perhaps without a parallel in literature. No chance of improvement is
missed, while nothing of value is dropped or thrown away. {125} There is
just now and then a momentary return perceptible to the skipping metre
and fantastic manner of the first period, which may have been
unconsciously suggested by the nature of the task in hand--a task of
itself implying or suggesting some new study of old models; but the main
style of the play in all its weightier parts is as distinctly proper to
the second period, as clear an evidence of inner and spiritual affinity
(with actual tabulation of dates, were such a thing as feasible as it is
impossible, I must repeat that the argument would here be--what it is
now--in no wise concerned), as is the handling of character throughout;
but most especially the subtle force, the impeccable and careful
instinct, the masculine delicacy of touch, by which the somewhat
ruffianly temperament of the original Ferando is at once refined and
invigorated through its transmutation into the hearty and humorous
manliness of Petruchio's.
It is observable that those few and faint traces which we have noticed in
this play of a faded archaic style trying as it were to resume a mockery
of revirescence are not wholly even if mainly confined to the underplot
which a suggestion or surmise of Mr. Collier's long since assigned to
Haughton, author of _Englishmen for my Money, or A Woman will have her
Will_: a spirited, vigorous, and remarkably regular comedy of intrigue,
full of rough and ready incident, bright boisterous humour, honest lively
provinciality and gay high-handed Philistinism. To take no account of
this attribution would be to show myself as shamelessly as shamefully
deficient in that respect and gratitude which all genuine and thankful
students will always be as ready to offer as all thankless and insolent
sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the venerable scholar who since I
was first engaged on these notes has added yet another obligation to the
many under which he had already laid all younger and lesser labourers in
the same field of study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled and
enriched of his great historical work on our early stage. It might seem
something of an unintended impertinence to add that such recognition of
his theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it--whatever such
acceptance on my part might be worth--than the expression of such
gratitude and respect could reasonably be supposed to imply an equally
blind confidence in the authority or the value of that version of
Shakespeare's text which has been the means of exposing a name so long
and so justly honoured, not merely to the natural and rational
inquisition of rival students, but to the rancorous and ribald obloquy of
thankless and frontless pretenders.
Here perhaps as well as anywhere else I may find a proper place to
intercalate the little word I have to say in partial redemption of my
pledge to take in due time some notice at more or less length, of the
only two among the plays doubtfully ascribed to Shakespeare which in my
eyes seem to bear any credible or conceivable traces of his touch. Of
these two I must give the lesser amount of space and attention to that
one which in itself is incomparably the more worthy of discussion,
admiration, and regard. The reason of this lies in the very excellence
which has attracted to it the notice of such competent judges and the
suffrage of such eminent names as would make the task of elaborate
commentary and analytic examination something more than superfluous on my
part; whereas the other has never been and will never be assigned to
Shakespeare by any critical student whose verdict is worth a minute's
consideration or the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it is on
other grounds worth notice; and such notice, to be itself of any value,
must of necessity be elaborate and minute. The critical analysis of
_King Edward III_. I have therefore relegated to its proper place in an
appendix; while I reserve a corner of my text, at once out of admiration
for the play itself and out of reverence for the names and authority of
some who have given their verdict in its behalf, for a rough and rapid
word or two on _Arden of Feversham_.
It is with equally inexpressible surprise that I find Mr. Collier
accepting as Shakespeare's any part of _A Warning for Fair Women_, and
rejecting without compromise or hesitation the belief or theory which
would assign to the youth of Shakespeare the incomparably nobler tragic
poem in question. {129} His first ascription to Shakespeare of _A
Warning for Fair Women_ is couched in terms far more dubious and
diffident than such as he afterwards adopts. It "might," he says, "be
given to Shakespeare on grounds far more plausible" (on what, except
possibly those of date, I cannot imagine) "than those applicable to
_Arden of Feversham_." He then proceeds to cite some detached lines and
passages of undeniable beauty and vigour, containing equally undeniable
coincidences of language, illustration, and expression with "passages in
Shakespeare's undisputed plays." From these he passes on to indicate a
"resemblance" which "is not merely verbal," and to extract whole speeches
which "are Shakespearean in a much better sense"; adding in a surely too
trenchant fashion, "Here we say, _aut Shakespeare aut diabolus_." I must
confess, with all esteem for the critic and all admiration for the brief
scene cited, that I cannot say, Shakespeare.
There are spirits of another sort from whom we naturally expect such
assumptions and inferences as start from the vantage ground of a few
separate or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap the empty
space intervening which divides them from the goal of evidence as to
authorship. Such a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whose
wealth of misused learning and fertility of misapplied conjecture I have
already paid all due tribute; but who must have had beyond all other sane
men--most assuredly, beyond all other fairly competent critics--the gift
bestowed on him by a malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argument
and possibility for proof. He was the very Columbus of mare's nests; to
the discovery of them, though they lay far beyond the pillars of
Hercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources possible to an
ultra-Baconian process of unphilosophical induction. On the devoted head
of Shakespeare--who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur--he would have
piled a load of rubbish, among which the crude and vigorous old tragedy
under discussion shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert. His
"School of Shakspere," though not an academy to be often of necessity
perambulated by the most peripatetic student of Shakespeare, will remain
as a monument of critical or uncritical industry, a storehouse of curious
if not of precious relics, and a warning for other than fair women--or
fair scholars--to remember where "it is written that the shoemaker should
meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his
pencil and the painter with his nets."
To me the difference appears immeasurable between the reasons for
admitting the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship in the case of
_Arden of Feversham_, and the pretexts for imagining the probability of
his partnership in _A Warning for Fair Women_. There is a practically
infinite distinction between the evidence suggested by verbal or even
more than verbal resemblance of detached line to line or selected passage
to passage, and the proof supplied by the general harmony and spiritual
similarity of a whole poem, on comparison of it as a whole with the known
works of the hypothetical author. This proof, at all events, we surely
do not get from consideration in this light of the plea put forward in
behalf of _A Warning for Fair Women_. This proof, I cannot but think, we
are very much nearer getting from contemplation under the same light of
the claim producible for _Arden of Feversham_.
_A Warning for Fair Women_ is unquestionably in its way a noticeable and
valuable "piece of work," as Sly might have defined it. It is perhaps
the best example anywhere extant of a merely realistic tragedy--of
realism pure and simple applied to the service of the highest of the
arts. Very rarely does it rise for a very brief interval to the height
of tragic or poetic style, however simple and homely. The epilogue
affixed to _Arden of Feversham_ asks pardon of the "gentlemen" composing
its audience for "this naked tragedy," on the plea that "simple truth is
gracious enough" without needless ornament or bedizenment of "glozing
stuff." Far more appropriate would such an apology have been as in this
case was at least superfluous, if appended by way of epilogue to _A
Warning for Fair Women_. That is indeed a naked tragedy; nine-tenths of
it are in no wise beyond the reach of an able, industrious, and practised
reporter, commissioned by the proprietors of the journal on whose staff
he might be engaged to throw into the force of scenic dialogue his
transcript of the evidence in a popular and exciting case of adultery and
murder. The one figure on the stage of this author which stands out
sharply defined in our recollection against a background of
undistinguished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and murderer. This
most discreditable of Browns has a distinct and brawny outline of his
own, a gait and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man, who might
have put to some better profit his shifty spirit of enterprise, his
genuine capacity of affection, his burly ingenuity and hardihood. His
minor confidants and accomplices, Mrs. Drury and her Trusty Roger, are
mere commonplace profiles of malefactors: but it is in the contrast
between the portraits of their two criminal heroines that the vast gulf
of difference between the capacities of the two poets yawns patent to the
sense of all readers. Anne Sanders and Alice Arden stand as far beyond
comparison apart as might a portrait by any average academician and a
portrait by Watts or Millais. Once only, in the simple and noble scene
cited by the over-generous partiality of Mr. Collier, does the widow and
murderess of Sanders rise to the tragic height of the situation and the
dramatic level of the part so unfalteringly sustained from first to last
by the wife and the murderess of Arden.
There is the self-same relative difference between the two subordinate
groups of innocent or guilty characters. That is an excellent and
effective touch of realism, where Brown comes across his victim's little
boy playing truant in the street with a small schoolfellow; but in _Arden
of Feversham_ the number of touches as telling and as striking as this
one is practically numberless. They also show a far stronger and keener
faculty of poetic if not of dramatic imagination. The casual encounter
of little Sanders with the yet red-handed murderer of his father is not
comparable for depth and subtlety of effect with the scene in which
Arden's friend Franklin, riding with him to Raynham Down, breaks off his
"pretty tale" of a perjured wife, overpowered by a "fighting at his
heart," at the moment when they come close upon the ambushed assassins in
Alice Arden's pay. But the internal evidence in this case, as I have
already intimated, does not hinge upon the proof or the suggestion
offered by any single passage or by any number of single passages. The
first and last evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the evidence
of character. A good deal might be said on the score of style in favour
of its attribution to a poet of the first order, writing at a time when
there were but two such poets writing for the stage; but even this is
here a point of merely secondary importance. It need only be noted in
passing that if the problem be reduced to a question between the
authorship of Shakespeare and the authorship of Marlowe there is no need
and no room for further argument. The whole style of treatment from end
to end is about as like the method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac is
like the method of Dumas. There could be no alternative in that case; so
that the actual alternative before us is simple enough: Either this play
is the young Shakespeare's first tragic masterpiece, or there was a
writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelled
him as a tragic dramatist not less--to say the very least--than he was
excelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragic poet.
If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point which I
regret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives--or if
at least we assume it for argument's sake in passing--we may easily
strengthen our position by adducing as further evidence in its favour the
author's thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of the prose
narrative on which his tragedy is founded. But, it may be objected, we
find the same fidelity to a similar text in the case of _A Warning for
Fair Women_. And here again starts up the primal and radical difference
between the two works: it starts up and will not be overlooked. Equal
fidelity to the narrative text we do undoubtedly find in either case; the
same fidelity we assuredly do not find. The one is a typical example of
prosaic realism, the other of poetic reality. Light from darkness or
truth from falsehood is not more infallibly discernible. The fidelity in
the one case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity of a
reporter to his notes. The fidelity in the other case is exactly the
fidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch. It
is a fidelity which admits--I had almost written, which requires--the
fullest play of the highest imagination. No more than the most realistic
of reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or even admissible
detail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to the lowest as to the
highest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) "the all in all in poetry."
Turning again for illustration to one of the highest names in imaginative
literature--a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed on
the register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that the
difference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas,
but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us take by way of
example the character next in importance to that of the heroine--the
character of her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched by Balzac;
a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray. But as with Balzac, so
with the author of this play, the masterful will combining with the
masterly art of the creator who fashions out of the worst kind of human
clay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so
pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all sense of such
abhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work which excited them no
high or even true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of dastardly
brutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbie at once receives and
repels the condolence of his mistress on his wound--
_Alice_.--Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart.
_Mosbie_.--_Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour_.--
even this does not make unendurable the scenic representation of what in
actual life would be unendurable for any man to witness. Such an
exhibition of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite increases
rather our wondering pity for its victim than our wondering sense of her
degradation. And this is a kind of triumph which only such an artist as
Shakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in prose can achieve.
Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of Shakespeare's, is the eldest
born of that group to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right of
weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of Glamis and the governor of
Tharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of them creations of a much
later date--if not of the very latest discernible or definable stage in
the art of Shakespeare. Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the
wife of Arden is much less of a born criminal than these. To her, at
once the agent and the patient of her crime, the victim and the
instrument of sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina, goddess of
love and death,--to her, even in the deepest pit of her deliberate
wickedness, remorse is natural and redemption conceivable. Like the
Phaedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the Phaedra of Euripides,
she is capable of the deepest and bitterest penitence,--incapable of
dying with a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long polluted lips.
Her latest breath is not a lie but a prayer.
Considering, then, in conclusion, the various and marvellous gifts
displayed for the first time on our stage by the great poet, the great
dramatist, the strong and subtle searcher of hearts, the just and
merciful judge and painter of human passions, who gave this tragedy to
the new-born literature of our drama; taking into account the really
wonderful skill, the absoluteness of intuition and inspiration, with
which every stroke is put in that touches off character or tones down
effect, even in the sketching and grouping of such minor figures as the
ruffianly hireling Black Will, the passionate artist without pity or
conscience, {141} and above all the "unimitated, inimitable" study of
Michael, in whom even physical fear becomes tragic, and cowardice itself
no ludicrous infirmity but rather a terrible passion; I cannot but
finally take heart to say, even in the absence of all external or
traditional testimony, that it seems to me not pardonable merely nor
permissible, but simply logical and reasonable, to set down this poem, a
young man's work on the face of it, as the possible work of no man's
youthful hand but Shakespeare's.
No similar question is raised, no parallel problem stated, in the case of
any one other among the plays now or ever ascribed on grounds more or
less dubious to that same indubitable hand. This hand I do not recognise
even in the _Yorkshire Tragedy_, full as it is to overflowing of fierce
animal power, and hot as with the furious breath of some caged wild
beast. Heywood, who as the most realistic and in some sense prosaic
dramatist of his time has been credited (though but in a modestly
tentative and suggestive fashion) with its authorship, was as incapable
of writing it as Chapman of writing the Shakespearean parts of _The Two
Noble Kinsmen_ or Fletcher of writing the scenes of Wolsey's fall and
Katherine's death in _King Henry VIII_. To the only editor of
Shakespeare responsible for the two earlier of the three suggestions here
set aside, they may be forgiven on the score of insufficient scholarship
and want of critical training; but on what ground the third suggestion
can be excused in the case of men who should have a better right than
most others to speak with some show of authority on a point of higher
criticism, I must confess myself utterly at a loss to imagine. In the
_Yorkshire Tragedy_ the submissive devotion of its miserable heroine to
her maddened husband is merely doglike,--though not even, in the
exquisitely true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, "most
passionately patient." There is no likeness in this poor trampled figure
to "one of Shakespeare's women": Griselda was no ideal of his. To find
its parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to
lesser great men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusively
masculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her--or
one such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as she
is even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is less
of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is Robert
Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another is
the heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy,
labelled to _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_, which in its central
situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful _Legend of
Florence_; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and most
graceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of that
somewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century of
painful European progress out of night and winter could only be made
credible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius of
Chaucer and Boccaccio.
For concentrated might and overwhelming weight of realism, this lurid
little play beats _A Warning for Fair Women_ fairly out of the field. It
is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for
pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging
rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumes
our very sense of repulsion as with fire. But such power as this, though
a rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for a dramatist; it is
not the fit property of a poet. Ford and Webster, even Tourneur and
Marston, who have all been more or less wrongfully though more or less
plausibly attacked on the score of excess in horror, have none of them
left us anything so nakedly terrible, so terribly naked as this. Passion
is here not merely stripped to the skin but stripped to the bones. I
cannot tell who could and I cannot guess who would have written it. "'Tis
a very excellent piece of work"; may we never exactly look upon its like
again!
I thought it at one time far from impossible, if not very nearly
probable, that the author of _Arden of Feversham_ might be one with the
author of the famous additional scenes to _The Spanish Tragedy_, and that
either both of these "pieces of work" or neither must be Shakespeare's. I
still adhere to Coleridge's verdict, which indeed must be that of all
judges capable of passing any sentence worthier of record than are
Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine:
to the effect that those magnificent passages, wellnigh overcharged at
every point with passion and subtlety, sincerity and instinct of pathetic
truth, are no less like Shakespeare's work than unlike Jonson's: though
hardly perhaps more unlike the typical manner of his adult and matured
style than is the general tone of _The Case is Altered_, his one
surviving comedy of that earlier period in which we know from Henslowe
that the stout-hearted and long struggling young playwright went through
so much theatrical hackwork and piecework in the same rough harness with
other now more or less notable workmen then drudging under the manager's
dull narrow sidelong eye for bare bread and bare shelter. But this
unlikeness, great as it is and serious and singular, between his former
and his latter style in high comedy, gives no warrant for us to believe
him capable of so immeasurable a transformation in tragic style and so
indescribable a decadence in tragic power as would be implied in a
descent from the "fine madness" of "old Jeronymo" to the flat sanity and
smoke-dried sobriety of _Catiline_ and _Sejanus_.--I cannot but think,
too, that Lamb's first hypothetical ascription of these wonderful scenes
to Webster, so much the most Shakespearean in gait and port and accent of
all Shakespeare's liege men-at-arms, was due to a far happier and more
trustworthy instinct than led him in later years to liken them rather to
"the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus Andronicus."
We have wandered it may be somewhat out of the right time into a far
other province of poetry than the golden land of Shakespeare's ripest
harvest-fields of humour. And now, before we may enter the "flowery
square" made by the summer growth of his four greatest works in pure and
perfect comedy "beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind" of all happiest
and most fragrant imagination, we have but one field to cross, one brook
to ford, that hardly can be thought to keep us out of Paradise. In the
garden-plot on whose wicket is inscribed _All's Well that Ends Well_, we
are hardly distant from Eden itself
About a young dove's flutter from a wood.
The ninth story of the third day of the Decameron is one of the few
subjects chosen by Shakespeare--as so many were taken by Fletcher--which
are less fit, we may venture to think, for dramatic than for narrative
treatment. He has here again shown all possible delicacy of instinct in
handling a matter which unluckily it was not possible to handle on the
stage with absolute and positive delicacy of feeling or expression. Dr.
Johnson--in my humble opinion, with some justice; though his verdict has
been disputed on the score of undeserved austerity--"could not reconcile
his heart to Bertram"; and I, unworthy as I may be to second or support
on the score of morality the finding of so great a moralist, cannot
reconcile my instincts to Helena. Parolles is even better than Bobadil,
as Bobadil is even better than Bessus; and Lafeu is one of the very best
old men in all the range of comic art. But the whole charm and beauty of
the play, the quality which raises it to the rank of its fellows by
making it loveable as well as admirable, we find only in the "sweet,
serene, skylike" sanctity and attraction of adorable old age, made more
than ever near and dear to us in the incomparable figure of the old
Countess of Roussillon. At the close of the play, Fletcher would
inevitably have married her to Lafeu--or rather possibly, to the King.
At the entrance of the heavenly quadrilateral, or under the rising dawn
of the four fixed stars which compose our Northern Cross among the
constellations of dramatic romance hung high in the highest air of
poetry, we may well pause for very dread of our own delight, lest
unawares we break into mere babble of childish rapture and infantile
thanksgiving for such light vouchsafed even to our "settentrional vedovo
sito" that even at their first dawn out of the depths
Goder pareva il ciel di lor fiammelle.
Beyond these again we see a second group arising, the supreme starry
trinity of the _Winter's Tale_, the _Tempest_, and _Cymbeline_: and
beyond these the divine darkness of everlasting and all-maternal night.
These seven lamps of the romantic drama have in them--if I may strain the
similitude a little further yet--more of lyric light than could fitly be
lent to feed the fire or the sunshine of the worlds of pure tragedy or
comedy. There is more play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours
of their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare's making can we pass
and repass at pleasure from the sunny to the stormy lights, from the
glory of _Cymbeline_ to the glory of _Othello_.
In this first group of four--wholly differing on that point from the
later constellation of three--there is but very seldom, not more than
once or twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam of anything more lurid
or less lovely than "a light of laughing flowers." There is but just
enough of evil or even of passion admitted into their sweet spheres of
life to proclaim them living: and all that does find entrance is so
tempered by the radiance of the rest that we retain but softened and
lightened recollections even of Shylock and Don John when we think of the
_Merchant of Venice_ and _Much Ado about Nothing_; we hardly feel in _As
You Like It_ the presence or the existence of Oliver and Duke Frederick;
and in _Twelfth Night_, for all its name of the midwinter, we find
nothing to remember that might jar with the loveliness of love and the
summer light of life.
No astronomer can ever tell which if any one among these four may be to
the others as a sun; for in this special tract of heaven "one star
differeth" not "from another star in glory." From each and all of them,
even "while this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close [us] in," we
cannot _but_ hear the harmony of a single immortal soul
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
The coincidence of the divine passage in which I have for once permitted
myself the freedom of altering for quotation's sake one little word, with
a noble excerpt given by Hallam from the Latin prose writings of
Campanella, may recall to us with a doubly appropriate sense of
harmonious fitness the subtly beautiful image of Lord Tennyson;--
Star to star vibrates light: may soul to soul
Strike thro' a finer element of her own?
Surely, if ever she may, such a clash might we fancy to have passed from
the spirit of the most glorious martyr and poet to the spirit of the most
glorious poet and artist upon the face of the earth together. Even to
Shakespeare any association of his name with Campanella's, as even to
Campanella any association of his name with Shakespeare's, cannot but be
an additional ray of honour: and how high is the claim of the divine
philosopher to share with the godlike dramatist their common and crowning
name of poet, all Englishmen at least may now perceive by study of
Campanella's sonnets in the noble and exquisite version of Mr. Symonds;
to whom among other kindred debts we owe no higher obligation than is due
to him as the giver of these poems to the inmost heart of all among his
countrymen whose hearts are worthy to hold and to hoard up such treasure.
Where nothing at once new and true can be said, it is always best to say
nothing; as it is in this case to refrain from all reiteration of
rhapsody which must have been somewhat "mouldy ere" any living man's
"grandsires had nails on their toes," if not at that yet remoter date
"when King Pepin of France was a little boy" and "Queen Guinever of
Britain was a little wench." In the _Merchant of Venice_, at all events,
there is hardly a single character from Portia to old Gobbo, a single
incident from the exaction of Shylock's bond to the computation of hairs
in Launcelot's beard and Dobbin's tail, which has not been more
plentifully beprosed than ever Rosalind was berhymed. Much wordy wind
has also been wasted on comparison of Shakespeare's Jew with Marlowe's;
that is, of a living subject for terror and pity with a mere mouthpiece
for the utterance of poetry as magnificent as any but the best of
Shakespeare's.
Nor can it well be worth any man's while to say or to hear for the
thousandth time that _As You Like It_ would be one of those works which
prove, as Landor said long since, the falsehood of the stale axiom that
no work of man's can be perfect, were it not for that one unlucky slip of
the brush which has left so ugly a little smear in one corner of the
canvas as the betrothal of Oliver to Celia; though, with all reverence
for a great name and a noble memory, I can hardly think that matters were
much mended in George Sand's adaptation of the play by the transference
of her hand to Jaques. Once elsewhere, or twice only at the most, is any
such other sacrifice of moral beauty or spiritual harmony to the
necessities and traditions of the stage discernible in all the world-wide
work of Shakespeare. In the one case it is unhappily undeniable; no mans
conscience, no conceivable sense of right and wrong, but must more or
less feel as did Coleridge's the double violence done it in the upshot of
_Measure for Measure_. Even in the much more nearly spotless work which
we have next to glance at, some readers have perhaps not unreasonably
found a similar objection to the final good fortune of such a pitiful
fellow as Count Claudio. It will be observed that in each case the
sacrifice is made to comedy. The actual or hypothetical necessity of
pairing off all the couples after such a fashion as to secure a nominally
happy and undeniably matrimonial ending is the theatrical idol whose
tyranny exacts this holocaust of higher and better feelings than the mere
liquorish desire to leave the board of fancy with a palatable morsel of
cheap sugar on the tongue.
If it is proverbially impossible to determine by selection the greatest
work of Shakespeare, it is easy enough to decide on the date and the name
of his most perfect comic masterpiece. For absolute power of
composition, for faultless balance and blameless rectitude of design,
there is unquestionably no creation of his hand that will bear comparison
with _Much Ado About Nothing_. The ultimate marriage of Hero and
Claudio, on which I have already remarked as in itself a doubtfully
desirable consummation, makes no flaw in the dramatic perfection of a
piece which could not otherwise have been wound up at all. This was its
one inevitable conclusion, if the action were not to come to a tragic
end; and a tragic end would here have been as painfully and as grossly
out of place as is any but a tragic end to the action of _Measure for
Measure_. As for Beatrice, she is as perfect a lady, though of a far
different age and breeding, as Celimene or Millamant; and a decidedly
more perfect woman than could properly or permissibly have trod the stage
of Congreve or Moliere. She would have disarranged all the dramatic
proprieties and harmonies of the one great school of pure comedy. The
good fierce outbreak of her high true heart in two swift words--"Kill
Claudio" {154}--would have fluttered the dovecotes of fashionable drama
to some purpose. But Alceste would have taken her to his own.
No quainter and apter example was ever given of many men's absolute
inability to see the plainest aims, to learn the simplest rudiments, to
appreciate the most practical requisites of art, whether applied to
theatrical action or to any other as evident as exalted aim, than the
instance afforded by that criticism of time past which sagaciously
remarked that "any less amusingly absurd" constables than Dogberry and
Verges would have filled their parts in the action of the play equally
well. Our own day has doubtless brought forth critics and students of
else unparalleled capacity for the task of laying wind-eggs in mare's
nests, and wasting all the warmth of their brains and tongues in the
hopeful endeavour to hatch them: but so fine a specimen was never dropped
yet as this of the plumed or plumeless biped who discovered that if
Dogberry had not been Dogberry and Verges had not been Verges they would
have been equally unsuccessful in their honest attempt to warn Leonato
betimes of the plot against his daughter's honour. The only explanation
of the mistake is this; and it is one of which the force will be
intelligible only to those who are acquainted with the very singular
physiology of that remarkably prolific animal known to critical science
as the Shakespearean scholiast: that if Dogberry had been other than
Dogberry, or if Verges had been other than Verges, the action and
catastrophe of the whole play could never have taken place at all.
All true Pantagruelians will always, or at least as long as may be
permitted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, cherish with an
especial regard the comedy in which Shakespeare also has shown himself as
surely the loving as he would surely have been the beloved disciple of
that insuppressible divine, the immortal and most reverend vicar of
Meudon. Two only among the mighty men who lived and wrote and died
within the century which gave birth to Shakespeare were found worthy of
so great an honour at his hands as the double homage of citation and
imitation: and these two, naturally and properly enough, were Francois
Rabelais and Christopher Marlowe. We cannot but recognise on what far
travels in what good company "Feste the jester" had but lately been, on
that night of "very gracious fooling" when he was pleased to enlighten
the unforgetful mind of Sir Andrew as to the history of Pigrogromitus,
and of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus. At what precise
degree of latitude and longitude between the blessed islands of Medamothy
and Papimania this equinoctial may intersect the Sporades of the outer
ocean, is a problem on the solution of which the energy of those many
modern sons of Aguecheek who have undertaken the task of writing about
and about the text and the history of Shakespeare might be expended with
an unusually reasonable hope and expectation of arriving at an
exceptionally profitable end.
Even apart from their sunny identity of spirit and bright sweet
brotherhood of style, the two comedies of _Twelfth Night_ and _As You
Like It_ would stand forth confessed as the common offspring of the same
spiritual period by force and by right of the trace or badge they proudly
and professedly bear in common, as of a recent touch from the ripe and
rich and radiant influence of Rabelais. No better and no fuller
vindication of his happy memory could be afforded than by the evident
fact that the two comedies which bear the imprint of his sign-manual are
among all Shakespeare's works as signally remarkable for the cleanliness
as for the richness of their humour. Here is the right royal seal of
Pantagruel, clean-cut and clearly stamped, and unincrusted with any flake
of dirt from the dubious finger of Panurge. In the comic parts of those
plays in which the humour is rank and flagrant that exhales from the lips
of Lucio, of Boult, or of Thersites, there is no trace or glimpse of
Rabelais. From him Shakespeare has learnt nothing and borrowed nothing
that was not wise and good and sweet and clean and pure. All the more
honour, undoubtedly, to Shakespeare, that he would borrow nothing else:
but assuredly, also, all the more honour to Rabelais, that he had enough
of this to lend.
It is less creditable to England than honourable to France that a
Frenchman should have been the first of Shakespearean students to
discover and to prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is not a
consecutive work of the same epoch. Until the appearance of Francois-
Victor Hugo's incomparable translation, with its elaborate and admirable
commentary, it seems to have been the universal and certainly a most
natural habit of English criticism to take the three as they usually
appear together, in the order of historical chronology, and by tacit
implication to assume that they were composed in such order. I should
take some shame to myself but that I feel more of grateful pride than of
natural shame in the avowal that I at all events owe the first revelation
of the truth now so clear and apparent in this matter, to the son of the
common lord and master of all poets born in his age--be they liege
subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious as I grieve to find one at
least of my elders and betters, whenever I perceive--as too often I
cannot choose but perceive--that the voice is the voice of Arnold, but
the hand is the hand of Sainte-Beuve.
To the honoured and lamented son of our beloved and glorious Master, whom
neither I nor any better man can ever praise and thank and glorify
enough, belongs all the credit of discerning for himself and discovering
for us all the truth that _Julius Caesar_ is at all points equally like
the greatest works of Shakespeare's middle period and unlike the works of
his last. It is in the main a play belonging to the same order as _King
Henry IV_.; but it differs from our English Henriade--as remarkably
unlike Voltaire's as _Zaire_ is unlike _Othello_--not more by the absence
of Falstaff than by the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shakespeare
has made full amends, if not to all modern democrats, yet assuredly to
all historical republicans, for any possible or apparent preference of
royal to popular traditions. Whatever manner of man may have been the
actual Roman, our Shakespearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest
figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the
world. "A democracy such as yours in America is my abhorrence," wrote
Landor once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee pseudosopher, who had
intruded himself on that great man's privacy in order to have the
privilege of afterwards informing the readers of a pitiful pamphlet on
England that Landor had "pestered him with Southey"; an impertinence, I
may add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with the sharpest contempt and
chastised with the haughtiest courtesy. But, the old friend and lifelong
champion of Kossuth went on to say, his feelings were far different
towards a republic; and if on the one point, then not less certainly on
the other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessions
would have been shared by the author of _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Caesar_.
Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of _Hamlet_, I hasten to
declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of
that "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a
bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of
amity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled _in partibus Episcopus_, _necnon_
the deuce knows what." I do not propose to prove my perception of any
point in the character of Hamlet "unseized by the Germans yet." I can
only determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me,
"to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue" not only
"from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering"--though this itself is a form
of abstinence not universally or even commonly practised among the
rampant rout of rival commentators--but also, now as ever throughout this
study, from all conscious repetition of what others have said before me.
In _Hamlet_, as it seems to me, we set foot as it were on the bridge
between the middle and the final period of Shakespeare. That priceless
waif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacity of a hungry
publisher is of course more accurately definable as the first play of
_Hamlet_ than as the first edition of the play. And this first _Hamlet_,
on the whole, belongs altogether to the middle period. The deeper
complexities of the subject are merely indicated. Simple and trenchant
outlines of character are yet to be supplanted by features of subtler
suggestion and infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost more of a
satirist than a philosopher: Asper and Macilente, Felice and Malevole,
the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by
Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with an
inevitable streak of caricature in them, of the first Hamlet; they would
have been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the second. The
Queen, whose finished figure is now something of a riddle, stands out
simply enough in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as
accomplice of Hamlet. There is not more difference between the sweet
quiet flow of those plain verses which open the original play within the
play and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substitutes, full-charged with
heavy classic artillery of Phoebus and Neptune and Tellus and Hymen, than
there is between the straightforward agents of their own destiny whom we
meet in the first _Hamlet_ and the obliquely moving patients who veer
sideways to their doom in the second.
This minor transformation of style in the inner play, made solely with
the evident view of marking the distinction between its duly artificial
forms of speech and the duly natural forms of speech passing between the
spectators, is but one among innumerable indications which only a
purblind perversity of prepossession can overlook of the especial store
set by Shakespeare himself on this favourite work, and the exceptional
pains taken by him to preserve it for aftertime in such fullness of
finished form as might make it worthiest of profound and perpetual study
by the light of far other lamps than illuminate the stage. Of all vulgar
errors the most wanton, the most wilful, and the most resolutely
tenacious of life, is that belief bequeathed from the days of Pope, in
which it was pardonable, to the days of Mr. Carlyle, in which it is not
excusable, to the effect that Shakespeare threw off _Hamlet_ as an eagle
may moult a feather or a fool may break a jest; that he dropped his work
as a bird may drop an egg or a sophist a fallacy; that he wrote "for
gain, not glory," or that having written _Hamlet_ he thought it nothing
very wonderful to have written. For himself to have written, he
possibly, nay probably, did not think it anything miraculous; but that he
was in the fullest degree conscious of its wonderful positive worth to
all men for all time, we have the best evidence possible--his own; and
that not by mere word of mouth but by actual stroke of hand. Ben Jonson
might shout aloud over his own work on a public stage, "By God 'tis
good," and so for all its real goodness and his real greatness make sure
that both the workman and his work should be less unnaturally than
unreasonably laughed at; Shakespeare knew a better way of showing
confidence in himself, but he showed not a whit less confidence. Scene
by scene, line for line, stroke upon stroke and touch after touch, he
went over all the old laboured ground again; and not to ensure success in
his own day and fill his pockets with contemporary pence, but merely and
wholly with a purpose to make it worthy of himself and his future
students. Pence and praise enough it had evidently brought him in from
the first. No more palpable proof of this can be desired than the
instantaneous attacks on it, the jeers, howls, hoots and hisses of which
a careful ear may catch some far faint echo even yet; the fearful and
furtive yelp from beneath of the masked and writhing poeticule, the
shrill reverberation all around it of plagiarism and parody. Not one
single alteration in the whole play can possibly have been made with a
view to stage effect or to present popularity and profit; or we must
suppose that Shakespeare, however great as a man, was naturally even
greater as a fool. There is a class of mortals to whom this inference is
always grateful--to whom the fond belief that every great man must needs
be a great fool would seem always to afford real comfort and support:
happy, in Prior's phrase, could their inverted rule prove every great
fool to be a great man. Every change in the text of _Hamlet_ has
impaired its fitness for the stage and increased its value for the closet
in exact and perfect proportion. Now, this is not a matter of opinion--of
Mr. Pope's opinion or Mr. Carlyle's; it is a matter of fact and evidence.
Even in Shakespeare's time the actors threw out his additions; they throw
out these very same additions in our own. The one especial speech, if
any one such especial speech there be, in which the personal genius of
Shakespeare soars up to the very highest of its height and strikes down
to the very deepest of its depth, is passed over by modern actors; it was
cut away by Hemings and Condell. We may almost assume it as certain that
no boards have ever echoed--at least, more than once or twice--to the
supreme soliloquy of Hamlet. Those words which combine the noblest
pleading ever proffered for the rights of human reason with the loftiest
vindication ever uttered of those rights, no mortal ear within our
knowledge has ever heard spoken on the stage. A convocation even of all
priests could not have been more unhesitatingly unanimous in its
rejection than seems to have been the hereditary verdict of all actors.
It could hardly have been found worthier of theological than it has been
found of theatrical condemnation. Yet, beyond all question, magnificent
as is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb
into a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on
philosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and
resolution.
That Shakespeare was in the genuine sense--that is, in the best and
highest and widest meaning of the term--a free thinker, this otherwise
practically and avowedly superfluous effusion of all inmost thought
appears to me to supply full and sufficient evidence for the conviction
of every candid and rational man. To that loftiest and most righteous
title which any just and reasoning soul can ever deserve to claim, the
greatest save one of all poetic thinkers has thus made good his right for
ever.
I trust it will be taken as no breach of my past pledge to abstain from
all intrusion on the sacred ground of Gigadibs and the Germans, if I
venture to indicate a touch inserted by Shakespeare for no other
perceptible or conceivable purpose than to obviate by anticipation the
indomitable and ineradicable fallacy of criticism which would find the
keynote of Hamlet's character in the quality of irresolution. I may
observe at once that the misconception involved in such a reading of the
riddle ought to have been evident even without this episodical stroke of
illustration. In any case it should be plain to any reader that the
signal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature is by no means
irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but rather the strong
conflux of contending forces. That during four whole acts Hamlet cannot
or does not make up his mind to any direct and deliberate action against
his uncle is true enough; true, also, we may say, that Hamlet had
somewhat more of mind than another man to make up, and might properly
want somewhat more time than might another man to do it in; but not, I
venture to say in spite of Goethe, through innate inadequacy to his task
and unconquerable weakness of the will; not, I venture to think in spite
of Hugo, through immedicable scepticism of the spirit and irremediable
propensity to nebulous intellectual refinement. One practical point in
the action of the play precludes us from accepting so ready a solution of
the riddle as is suggested either by the simple theory of
half-heartedness or by the simple hypothesis of doubt. There is
absolutely no other reason, we might say there was no other excuse, for
the introduction or intrusion of an else superfluous episode into a play
which was already, and which remains even after all possible excisions,
one of the longest plays on record. The compulsory expedition of Hamlet
to England, his discovery by the way of the plot laid against his life,
his interception of the King's letter and his forgery of a substitute for
it against the lives of the King's agents, the ensuing adventure of the
sea-fight, with Hamlet's daring act of hot-headed personal intrepidity,
his capture and subsequent release on terms giving no less patent proof
of his cool-headed and ready-witted courage and resource than the attack
had afforded of his physically impulsive and even impetuous hardihood--all
this serves no purpose whatever but that of exhibiting the instant and
almost unscrupulous resolution of Hamlet's character in time of practical
need. But for all that he or Hamlet has got by it, Shakespeare might too
evidently have spared his pains; and for all this voice as of one crying
in a wilderness, Hamlet will too surely remain to the majority of
students, not less than to all actors and all editors and all critics,
the standing type and embodied emblem of irresolution, half-heartedness,
and doubt.
That Hamlet should seem at times to accept for himself, and even to
enforce by reiteration of argument upon his conscience and his reason,
some such conviction or suspicion as to his own character, tells much
rather in disfavour than in favour of its truth. A man whose natural
temptation was to swerve, whose inborn inclination was to shrink and
skulk aside from duty and from action, would hardly be the first and last
person to suspect his own weakness, the one only unbiassed judge and
witness of sufficiently sharp-sighted candour and accuracy to estimate
aright his poverty of nature and the malformation of his mind. But the
high-hearted and tender-conscienced Hamlet, with his native bias towards
introspection intensified and inflamed and directed and dilated at once
by one imperative pressure and oppression of unavoidable and unalterable
circumstance, was assuredly and exactly the one only man to be troubled
by any momentary fear that such might indeed be the solution of his
riddle, and to feel or to fancy for the moment some kind of ease and
relief in the sense of that very trouble. A born doubter would have
doubted even of Horatio; hardly can all positive and almost palpable
evidence of underhand instigation and inspired good intentions induce
Hamlet for some time to doubt even of Ophelia.